


A Duck, a Fox, and a Bag of Grain

by dith



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-28
Updated: 2012-05-28
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:09:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dith/pseuds/dith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aliens made them do it, pure and simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Duck, a Fox, and a Bag of Grain

"I can't believe you're smiling like that. You think this is funny?" Tony waved around, indicating all six walls of the featureless cube.

"Well," and the small smile played around the corner of Bruce's mouth as he studied the instrumentation of his handheld spectrometer, "a bunch of aliens grab us in a tractor beam, dump us in here, and claim - through a telepathic suggestion they plant in our minds - that we have to have sex to escape. You don't think that's pretty ridiculous?"

"Funny things are funny." Tony jerked his head back toward the far side of the cube - six feet away - where Captain America was looking paler than one of the white stripes on the shield he didn't have. It was clear that not everyone was finding this one funny.

"Oh." Bruce's face sobered. "I'm sorry, Steve."

"Sorry for what?"

"I just meant - I know this wouldn't be funny to you."

"I can't quite understand why it's funny to *you*." Steve was looking up, down, around, and largely avoiding the eyes of his cellmates.

Bruce was lucky enough to have a scientific instrument to look at. "It helps if you lived through the sexual revolution," he said softly, not accusatorily.

"Well, I didn't."

"Yeah, we know." Tony was examining one of the corner seams with his fingertips.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, then Steve said, "Well, what happened?"

"What happened what?" Tony's eyes flicked to Steve.

"During the sexual revolution. What happened?" Steve's cheeks were turning pink - it must be hell to be so blond and so clueless, thought Tony - but he asked in the same sort of patient Just-teach-me tone that he used about so many things that others kept saying he should know something about.

"Dr. Banner," said Tony, turning back to his examination of the seam. This time he tried to poke one of his hairs into the nonexistent seam.

Bruce smiled a little again, kept his eyes down to try to minimize Steve's blushing. He had observed that nothing caused blushing to get worse quicker than observing it. "Okay, well, I think it could be summed up as society generally coming to the realization that people do have sex and that largely it wasn't such a bad thing." Bruce rubbed his temple. "I guess one of the main features was that women were allowed to have sex as well."

"Not applicable right now," Tony said to the wall.

Steve grimaced. "Well, speaking for my generation, I can tell you that we were perfectly aware, prior to - whenever this was - "

"Around about the seventies, I think," said Bruce, looking to Tony for confirmation.

"- prior to the seventies, that people did, and do, have sex."

"I think one of the features that came along with that is a slightly more relaxed attitude toward sex."

"Burdened by a great many hypocritical and contradictory exclusions," added Tony, now examining the opposite corner.

"True," Bruce nodded, "it wasn't total, but in general, I would say a more relaxed attitude toward sex."

Steve nodded. "So nowadays sex is just something you have, not something that's a little more..."

Bruce looked at Steve.

"...intimate."

Bruce's eyebrows crinkled a little bit. "Well, if it's not intimate, I'm not sure it's actually sex."

"Can be," said Tony from yet a third corner.

"Special." Now Steve's eartips were pink as well, but he was insistent. "Private."

"Can be," Tony said again, "but not this time. Gentlemen, I don't see any seams in this cube. None. Basic laws of engineering would indicate that that means that there is a finite amount of breathable air in this cube and I think you both know what finite means."

"How do we know they'll let us out if we do what they say?" Steve asked grimly.

"We don't. Anyone else have any other suggestions, I'm sure we'd all be interested in entertaining them. Until then, gentlemen, time to whip them out."

"Oh for - " Steve's face was now burning red, and he turned away.

"Wait a minute, I'm not in on this," said Bruce, putting up a warding hand.

"Now what?" Tony's eyes bored into Bruce.

"I can't - if my heart rate - "

"Going to have to give it a go."

"Do you see the size of this cube? If the other guy shows up, it's barely enough to hold *him*. You two would be strawberry jam on the walls." Bruce's pupils were expanding, he backed away. "Absolutely not, no way -"

"Bruce, what did you think was going to happen?" Tony asked very evenly.

"You two would get out, then come back and get me," Bruce shrugged.

"Come back. To where? Anyone know where we are? Anyone got so much as a compass on them? Bruce, we are in our street clothes - why you have a spectrometer in your pocket I can only speculate, I suppose it's not that unusual, but I must point out that we have nothing else. Nothing. No weapons, no instruments, not even Cap's shield. We don't know where we are, who has us, or how far we are from home. Or even Earth. How exactly was that 'coming back to get you' thing going to work?"

Bruce was shaking his head no, eyes down, back against the wall, but Tony just grasped his upper arm. "Look, buddy, you are just going to have to rub one out for freedom here."

Bruce still didn't look up. Tony tossed over his shoulder, "And in case that isn't clear, Captain, that means -"

"Yes, I do understand quite a few phrases from context," Steve said loudly to the wall in front of him.

"Will that even work?" Bruce said, still without meeting Tony's eyes.

"I don't claim to be an expert on alien telepathic communication but what I got was a general suggestion of 'reach sexual completion together'. Does that sort of sound like what you got?"

The other two made various unenthusiastic sounds of assent.

"So, that's what we're going to do. They kidnapped the wrong three superheros if they wanted a full-on multiple penetration porno."

Against the wall Steve winced. Tony ignored it.

"We can just masturbate, just a little friendly group masturbation, and we should be out of here."

"Friendly. Uh huh. The other guy will crush you both to death in a very friendly way." Bruce's eyes, and voice, were bleak.

Tony shook the upper arm he was holding a little. Bruce finally met his eyes.

"You can do this," said Tony, very firmly. "I know you can. I'll help."

"That's not going to help," Bruce half-chuckled, half-groaned.

"Look, it's going to be much worse for Steve. Don't drag it out."

"Why worse for me?" At that, Steve turned around to face the other two.

Tony was looking at Bruce but raising his eyebrows and twitching his head back towards Steve, as if to signal something to Bruce. Bruce's face changed entirely as he remembered. "I forgot there for a minute. I really am sorry, Steve."

"Don't be sorry for him, maintaining a record of avoiding sex is not something to be proud of," Tony stage-whispered to Bruce.

"I didn't - Oh, so you guys think I can't do this because I'm a virgin."

Both Tony and Bruce looked surprised, then looked at Steve.

"You both know." Steve's cheeks were pinking up again, but he looked angry, and his brow was doing the "frowning Captain America" frown.

"Everybody knows." Tony was cut off when he said "Ow" because Bruce elbowed him in the ribs.

"Well, that's very interesting, what you *think* you know. I served in the Army, and I'm not a prude. Contrary to what you might think, there were even such things as --"

He waved a hand, and Tony helpfully supplied "Circle jerk."

"--as that back in my day. If I didn't participate, you can assume it's because I have - "

This time Bruce supplied the word, gently. "Values."

"--Standards." And Steve's jaw muscles flexed as he said it.

"Well, this is one of those times when you're going to have to pretend it didn't happen, or that it doesn't mean what it means. Like those really religious girls nowadays who claim that they're virgins even when they've let like six boys give it to them up the --"

"Tony," Bruce interrupted gently again, "I don't think that helps. Captain America is a very - " here he smiled at Steve, his smile warm and real, "- honest guy."

"Well, that's between him and his personal issues, I don't really care one way or the other. Based on standard atmospheric pressure and the volume of this room, our time in here is ticking away, so, chop chop."

Tony unzipped his trousers, and Bruce looked away at the floor but put his hand on his pants button.

Steve looked at the ceiling, face burning, scarlet red, and said, "I'm not sure I'm going to be able to."

Tony let out an exasperated huff. "Look, you just *said* -"

"I know what I said!" Steve shouted back at him. "I know what I'm saying now too. I mean I might not be *able*."

"What? Look at you, that body is what, twenty-four? twenty-six?, you ought to be able to get hard in a heartbeat -"

"I don't know, okay? I've never tried anything like this before and - Not everyone can just jump right into the deep end of - You, you act like you do this sort of thing all the *time*!"

The last word Steve almost spit right into Tony's face, and Tony went from astonished to laughing in the next second.

For the first time, Tony laughed. "God, it's like one of those horrible puzzles where you have a duck and a fox and a bag of grain and you can only put two in a boat at the same time to get them over the river and if you don't do it right, the fox eats the duck or - "

Steve just looked bewildered.

Tony put his hands on Steve's shoulders, and smiled as he said, "I have done a lot of even crazier things, Cap, I cannot lie to you on that one." Then as Steve scowled and his ears turned so red they threatened to burst into flame, Tony added, "This is not the deep end."

Then Tony rested his thumbs at the base of Steve's throat, and Steve relaxed a tiny, minute amount.

"But it's going to be okay," Tony assured him.

Then he turned to Bruce, and put one hand out to Bruce. "It's going to be okay." Bruce just looked down at the ground. "Bruce, man. Take my hand."

Bruce put his hand in Tony's but didn't look up. He wasn't blushing; his body was collapsed in on itself, one arm wrapped around his waist, shoulders hunched.

"Bruce." Now Tony's voice was softer. "I'm going to help."

"That's not going to make it any easier for Steve," Bruce mumbled unhappily.

"Actually," said Steve, keeping his eyes fixed on Tony's fingers rubbing the back of Bruce's hand, "I think it will."

"Really?" Unhappiness was swept off Bruce's face by a wave of curiosity, and he looked up with clear, open eyes at Steve and said "But - "

"This is not an experiment, Dr. Banner, this is a field exercise. Come on." Tony flicked his eyes toward Bruce's fly.

Still a little diffidently, but more relaxed, Bruce undid his fly, awkwardly pushed down the briefs underneath and released a thick, dark, rapidly hardening cock, which he grasped and thumbed over its head with the hand Tony wasn't still holding.

"And just for the record, I am totally going to look," Tony said just to make Bruce chuckle, which, thank goodness, he did.

"All right, Cap, light it up," said Tony, turning his attention back to Steve, thumb still resting at the base of his throat.

Steve swallowed, his head tipped forward, but he unzipped his own trousers in a business-like enough fashion, and a very straight, rapidly reddening cock burst itself out the front of his boxer shorts. "Nice," said Tony before he thought, and then when Steve's eyes snapped up to meet his, Tony nodded encouragingly.

"Don't - " Steve hadn't pulled away from Tony's hand, but he pulled away from Tony's eyes. "Not me."

Tony just nodded, and let go of Steve, pulling Bruce closer so the two of them were standing face-to-face with Steve to one side of them. Bruce was groaning at the feel of his own thumb rubbing over the crown of his cock - of course he wouldn't be quiet - and shooting unhappy looks again at Tony. "I don't know if I can - "

"Yes you can." Tony fixed Bruce's eyes with his own, dark brown laser-like eyes that kept Bruce's attention. "I know you can do this."

"You don't understand. You - it's not like you make my heart rate go *down*."

Tony quirked half a smile at that. Well well. "Sorry about that," he said in a light tone that made it clear that he wasn't sorry at all, while his eyes told Bruce that he understood exactly what Bruce was saying, and that he was flattered, and pleased, and right back at you, buddy.

"Anyway," Bruce gasped, "what about you?"

Tony squeezed Bruce's hand and unzipped himself, only a little awkwardly because he was ambidextrous but it was one-handed. "I've been hard since we started having this discussion," Tony said conversationally.

He looked up for just an instant to see Steve had his eyes, burning blue eyes, fixed on Tony's shorter, redder cock. That's right, Captain, Tony thought, it's not as long as yours but it's thickness that matters. But Steve, his own face immobile, hand working back and forth, wasn't looking at Tony's face, so Tony turned back to Bruce.

"So, ah, are you the duck, the fox, or the, ah, bag of grain?" Bruce cocked an eyebrow as he leaned his head back on the wall, eyes hooded from arousal, hand working over the head of the dick that thrust out the front of his pants, and fixed Tony with a look.

Tony smiled, as Bruce had apparently intended for him to do, and it was enjoyable, seeing Bruce like this, man, he moved fast, but then Bruce started to turn his head back and forth, then thumped it backwards against the wall. "Tony, I can't -"

"Bruce, I've been meaning to ask you about whether or not you think a general solution to the Navier-Stokes equation exists."

"Huh?" Tony noticed that Bruce's eyes unfogged a little but his cock stayed very hard. Check, thought Tony. Bruce cleared his throat. "You want to talk about turbulence?"

"Well, it's applicable to the engineering of the Mark point x suit," said Tony, rubbing his own cock a little faster. Was he the only one here who missed lube? "I mean, I'm obviously always trying to optimize the aerodynamics of the suit such that air flow remains laminar even at speeds past mach."

"But that's a - a physical application," said Bruce, and Tony nodded encouragingly. "I mean, that's different from the question of why the Reynolds number has to be above 100 for turbulence to develop. And that's what - oh God - that's what at the heart of the question of turbulence on a theoretical level."

"Right, that's right." Tony turned Bruce's hand, threaded his fingers through it. His eyes demanded that Bruce's eyes stay on his, and they did. "So you could help me improve the suit - as well as win a million dollars - if you could explain to me how laminar flow becomes turbulent. I mean, if you believe that singularities arise spontaneously in the otherwise smooth flow -"

"But there must be a maximum applicable smoothness to which you can really machine the external surfaces of the suit." Bruce's expression was questioning, even as his mouth was open and he was breathing hard, and good, good, thought Tony, laying his thumb against Bruce's wrist and they said you couldn't feel a pulse with your thumb and if Tony couldn't feel it, that was okay with him, because that meant it wasn't going haywire.

"But what if there wasn't? What if I discovered a polymer that could lay down a layer of sufficient thickness that the surface - just the surface - generated no friction at all?"

"A frictionless molecule? But how would you - "

"But just imagine that I *could*. So the question becomes, how do you model the flow of air and decide when it will become turbulent? If you don't have any seed points generated by interference from the actual surface? Bruce, *at what point do singularities spontaneously generate*? Or is that even what happens at all?"

Bruce's face was scrunched up in thought, his hand moving faster, and Tony could feel his heartrate going up but it had to be within normal levels, it just had to be.

He decided to check on Cap out the corner of his eye and saw Steve, face brick red, also leaning against the wall behind him, panting. He wasn't staring at Tony's cock any more, where it was being worked back and forth in a business-like enough manner, nor was he staring at Bruce's; he was staring at their hands, clasped together in mid-air, holding on for dear life.

And wasn't *that* interesting.

Tony looked too long. Feeling the gaze on him Steve's eyes shifted to Tony's, and Tony saw in them something much more primal than he'd ever seen in Steve's eyes before. Whatever he had said with his own look to Bruce, Steve's look was promising Tony that if he had Tony alone, he'd be fucking him through the floor right now.

It was so fierce and so unexpected that Tony felt his whole body stutter, his hand squeezed Bruce's, his knees shifted under him, and felt his orgasm climbing up through him like he was in its grip.

"Tony," Bruce choked out.

"If you could figure it out, the velocity of the next Mark suit increases exponentially," Tony rasped, his eyes unable to tear away from Steve's gaze, his hand, already impossibly tight, holding on to Bruce. "Think of it as a power-of-ten jump in efficiency."

Bruce half-growled, "I've never been sure why they assume that the linear scale of the flow can be reduced to one number -"

Then his body arced forward, the orgasm bursting out of him and Tony had just a moment to see and to wonder how long it had been, and note that while his body was spasming, Bruce's beautiful dark expressive eyes were open, and fixed above Tony's head somewhere, presumably seeing Reynolds combinations written in the air and trying to solve them.

It was a beautiful picture and Tony rode it over the edge.

Quick as lightning he let Bruce's hand go and reached out with that hand to grab the back of Steve's neck.

"Come," he said, his eyes boring into Steve's, and he squeezed Steve's thick muscles bunching at the back of his neck even as he squeezed his own cock and twisted along the top, ah yes, just the way he liked it.

Bruce was still spurting, sliding quietly down the wall, as Tony shot over him, lines of come striping Bruce's trouser legs, and Steve shuddered all over and his eyes finally closed and turning slightly away from them both he came, exploding against the cell wall, groaning like a man who's been shot, bracing himself with a hand before he fell over.

Tony wanted to say something about how impressed he was, twice, because, damn, but he knew that people only came like that when they'd gone without for a while and he didn't approve of that, plus it seemed like the type of thing that, yes, he could imagine being awkward, oh, about thirty seconds after he said it. Maybe ten.

"You were aiming for simultaneous," Bruce gasped from his place slumped on the floor. "Are you always this overambitious?"

"The message I got was 'together'. Not sure how many ways there were to interpret that," replied Tony, catching his own breath, wishing he too could slide down the wall and on to the floor but feeling somehow that it was on him to set a good example. "And how many more tries were we going to be able to go for?"

Steve just held himself up against the wall, breathing hard.

They all just stood there for a moment, listening to their labored breaths, oddly together and yet apart. It felt odd to Tony that it wasn't even more awkward.

Then Steve breathed out heavily, put his hand down to help Bruce up.

It was such a simple, human gesture, it took Tony rather aback.

"Anyone have any hand sanitizer on them?" Bruce breathed out, staring at the mess they'd made on the floor and the wall.

Tony had a sterile wipe in his pocket he kept for press conferences - he really didn't like all those germs.

Bruce shimmied out of his pants and underwear, and both of the other two failed to look surprised at his muscular bare thighs or the softening cock between them. Bruce hiked the pants back on, and used the briefs to wipe up the mess, following with Tony's handi-wipe.

"Just in case," he said grimly, "that what they wanted was some superhero sperm to play with."

That made Tony's eyes get bigger, because that hadn't even occurred to him, and things usually did, but before he could talk Steve said, "Should you have waited till they opened the door, then?"

"Too bad - that one was non-negotiable."

Under other circumstances Tony might have begged to differ, even though he could tell from Bruce's face that non-negotiable meant non-negotiable, but just at that moment, one of the walls retreated, causing seams where there absolutely had not been any before, and slid to the side.

Into the open black empty space slid the Mark VII, and Captain America's suit and shield.

"That's fucked up," said Tony before he could stop himself, even as he was laying his hands on the briefcase that turned itself into his suit.

"What, no one else has ever gotten to play the part of a rat in a maze?" asked Steve with the slightest edge of bitterness to his tone. He ripped off his civilian clothes as if he couldn't stand to be in them a second longer, and skimmed into his Captain suit in seconds flat.

Through the eye holes in his cowl he looked at the other two. "That was just round one," he said and lunged toward the door.

"Wait," said Tony authoritatively and his faceplate locked into place. Then he put out his hand and gathered up the used underwear and wipe from Bruce, tucked it into a compartment of the suit.

Captain America just nodded. Now, of the three of them, Bruce looked the smallest and most fragile. "Let's try to keep Bruce from having to change as long as possible," said the Captain. "We don't know who - or what - is out there."

The other two nodded, Bruce's eyes tilted down automatically the way they did when he didn't want anyone to notice him.

"Cap." The blue mask turned toward Iron Man and Tony's mind went blank.

"We good?" Bruce asked Captain America in a low voice.

"Let's stay together," said Captain America. He nodded toward the door, and as one, they charged through.


End file.
